Chappie (2015)

* ½ out of ****

In a movie that has aspirations of teaching us something, instead we get “Short Circuit” meets “Robocop” for the brain damaged. A lot more of “Short Circuit” than “Robocop”, if that's any consolation.

In the near future a South African corporation called Tetravaal has developed a police robot that is in wide use for crime control. Deon (Dev Patel), the engineer that developed the robots, has aspirations of creating a true artificial intelligence but he is rebuffed on his design plans by the company's CEO (Sigourney Weaver). Meanwhile a competing engineer at Tetravaal (Hugh Jackman) wants his much larger, more aggressive and heavily armed robot to be given a shot. Unfortunately for him, the police prefer the original model. Anyone see a Robocop ripoff here?

Deon decides to steal a decommissioned robot scheduled to be destroyed to test his artificial intelligence program on – I guess he never heard of Skynet or the Terminator. It just seems that giving an indestructible robot free will is a little risky.... But Deon is kidnapped with his materials by a group of criminals – led by Ninja and Yolandi (played by.... Ninja and Yolandi). The have plans to get one of the police robots and get it to work for them. Their timing is impeccable.

Deon puts his programming into the robot, who wakes up with all of the intellect of a baby. Of course, it learns much faster. Yolandi immediately feels a parental responsibility to the robot, who she calls “Chappie”. Deon wants the robot to develop intelligence for science's sake, while Ninja wants him to be a dog-on-a-leash killing machine (Ninja is a hard-core jackass).

Chappie is little more than Johnny 5 with titanium casing, without the laughs. The robot's personal development and learning his own desires and needs, his grappling with his own mortality, and his wrestling with feelings are all meant to be “deep” but are very contrived and silly. Meanwhile Hugh Jackman's unstoppable desire to get his own robot in use no matter the cost shows him to be an utter psycho rather than the self-possessed “bad guy” he was intended to be.

The effects aren't bad, but the robot effects and Chappie's “humanity” have been done before, most recently in “I, Robot” (2004).\ The late-film ability to upload consciousness is also torn directly from another film, “Transcendence” (2014) which itself was a ripoff....

Look, I understand that a movie like “Chappie” isn't meant to be realistic, but everything about this movie, the villains, the heroes, the criminal-underground subplot.... it's all too ridiculous to even try to suspend disbelief. Add to it (no spoiler intended) and ending that just defies reason in every way.

The movie isn't a complete waste of time, but the filmmaker's attempt to be meaningful is obvious and falls completely flat. The human characters are universally stupid an unlikable, and the lack of logic in virtually everyone's thinking and actions make this whole thing a very poor effort.

My recommendation is to stay away.